When they left Mr. Bolby, therefore, and were comfortably established in a quiet hotel in Jermyn Street, Dick, seeing that Reginald was absolutely indifferent as to where he went, or what he did, took the whole arrangement of their London life into his own hands and succeeded in going to a good many places which would have terribly shocked the vicar had he known. Not that such forbidden pleasures did them much harm, for both lads were extremely sensible for their age, still Dick finding himself able, through Reginald's generosity, to spend a good deal of money, took his friend and himself to sundry shady places of which they might just as well have been ignorant. But Nemesis soon came down upon the unhappy Richard, and just as he was developing into a fair specimen of a man about Town his bachelor uncle at Folkestone wrote him a letter asking him to come down on a visit and as Dick was supposed to be his bachelor uncle's heir, he had to leave Town, much to his own disgust and to the regret of Reginald, who missed his lively friend every hour of the day.
He still stayed in Town, however, but as he knew no one, his existence was to say the least extremely dull. Reginald was essentially of a social nature and wanted someone to whom he could talk, therefore he was not sorry when one day Basil Beaumont, who had been waiting for the departure of Dick, called upon him and henceforth constituted himself his bear leader. As they had seen nothing of the artist since their arrival in Town, Dick had never thought of telling Reginald his mistrust of the fascinating Beaumont, so the young man, remembering the artist's kindness about his probable career as a singer, felt very friendly towards him and was quite prepared to accept his offer of companionship as the outcome of a kindly disposition and not the result of a carefully calculated scheme.
A more dangerous companion for a young man in a depressed state of mind than Beaumont could hardly be imagined, for he led Reginald to plunge into riotous pleasures for the sake of distraction, from which he would have otherwise recoiled. Having an eminently refined mind, and a delight in cultured company, had he been thoroughly healthy he would never have been drawn by this modern Mephistopheles into the vortex of frenzied pleasure in which his days and nights were now engulfed. But, being in a morbid state of mind, he brooded eternally over the presumed stigma attached to his name until it became a perfect nightmare to him. He thought that everyone knew his miserable story and despised him for the anomalous position he now occupied, so, in a mad spirit of bravado, he became quite reckless, and determined to defy the world which his sensitive spirit imagined to be sneering at him as a bastard. Terrible to relate, in spite of the relationship existing between them, Beaumont, who should have prevented the young man from falling into such an unhealthy state of mind, rather encouraged his gloomy fits than otherwise, as he thought it would give him a greater hold than ever over his son, so deliberately led the unhappy young man on to ruin--ruin, not of his fortune or position, but of his physical and moral nature.